Funny Enough to Be Sad

Portis wanted to meet at a cafeteria. Not a restaurant, not a bar. A cafeteria, the kind with a steam table and trays that slide on metal rails and women in hairnets who look at you like you have already disappointed them. He said he knew one in Little Rock that had not changed since 1961 and that this was a recommendation, not a warning. L’Amour said he could meet anywhere there was coffee. I said the cafeteria was fine.

It was called Franke’s, and Portis was not lying about it. The ceiling tiles were water-stained in a pattern that suggested decades of roof trouble addressed with minimal enthusiasm. The meat loaf was under a heat lamp that had been doing its job since the Kennedy administration. There was a handwritten sign taped to the register that said NO CHECKS and another that said SWEET TEA IS SWEET — DON’T ASK. Portis was already seated with a tray containing meat loaf, green beans, cornbread, and a glass of iced tea. He was eating with the focused efficiency of a man who considers food a task to be completed rather than an experience to be savored.

“I don’t do interviews,” he said when I sat down.

I told him this wasn’t an interview. It was a conversation about a story we were going to write together.

“That’s worse,” he said. He ate a piece of cornbread. “An interview at least has the structure of a known humiliation. A conversation about writing is a humiliation with no exit.”

L’Amour arrived in a Western-cut jacket that looked like it had been through actual weather, not the kind of weather that happens at book signings. He got himself a tray — roast beef, mashed potatoes, no vegetables — and sat down across from Portis. They had not met before. They looked at each other with the careful neutrality of two dogs who have been introduced in a yard that belongs to neither of them.

“I liked True Grit,” L’Amour said. “I’ve said so publicly.”

“That’s kind of you.”

“It wasn’t kindness. It was a good book. Mattie Ross is the best narrator in Western fiction. She’s better than anything I’ve written.”

Portis looked at him. “That’s a generous thing to say, and I suspect you mean it, and I don’t know what to do with it, so I’m going to eat this green bean.” He ate the green bean.

I said I wanted to talk about what happens when you put irony into a Western. Because that was the crux of this project — Portis’s deadpan comic intelligence and L’Amour’s earnest frontier authority, cohabiting in the same story. Two men on a last ride. An elegiac Western. But one of them, the narrator, would have a voice that refused to let anything stay solemn for more than a paragraph.

L’Amour put his fork down. “I don’t have a problem with humor in a Western. I’ve written funny scenes. A man who can’t see humor in a cattle drive has never been on one.”

“There’s humor and there’s irony,” Portis said. “Humor is a man stepping in a cow patty. Irony is a man stepping in a cow patty on his way to his own hanging and noticing that the cow patty bothers him more than the hanging.”

“That second one. That’s what I want in this story,” I said.

“Of course it is,” Portis said. “It’s the interesting one. The first one is Blazing Saddles. Nothing wrong with Blazing Saddles, but it’s a comedy about Westerns. The second one is a Western that happens to have a narrator with eyes. Most Western narrators see the landscape and the villainy and the necessity of action. Mine see all that and also see that the whole enterprise is faintly ridiculous, and the ridiculousness does not make it less serious. It makes it more serious. Because a man who knows something is absurd and does it anyway — that man has made a choice. A man who doesn’t see the absurdity hasn’t chosen anything. He’s just following the current.”

L’Amour was listening. Not agreeing, not disagreeing. Taking it in with the patience of a man who has spent time in deserts and knows that the useful thing to do in heat is hold still.

“I won’t write a story that mocks the people in it,” he said.

“Nobody’s talking about mockery.”

“You say that, but irony has a way of becoming mockery when the writer gets lazy. You start with a narrator who sees the absurdity of the situation, and the next thing you know, the narrator is above the situation, looking down at these poor cowboys like a man looking at ants. I’ve read that Western. The literary Western where some English professor type writes about the frontier like it’s a museum exhibit. The cowboys are specimens. The violence is ironic. The landscape is a metaphor for something the writer learned in graduate school. I’d rather read a bad pulp Western than a good one of those.”

“So would I,” Portis said. This seemed to surprise L’Amour. “The problem with the literary Western isn’t the irony. It’s the distance. The narrator stands apart. My narrators don’t stand apart. Mattie Ross is in it up to her elbows. She’s funny because she’s too close to the situation to see it the way a sane person would, and her inability to see herself clearly is the comedy. She doesn’t know she’s funny. That’s essential. A narrator who knows he’s funny is doing a performance. A narrator who is funny without knowing it is telling the truth.”

I said I thought our narrator could be something between those two things. Not Mattie’s magnificent obliviousness, but not a knowing wink either. A man who has the vocabulary to describe what he’s doing as absurd but who does it anyway because the alternative — sitting still, letting the world change without him — is worse. A man whose humor is a form of endurance rather than detachment.

“Endurance,” L’Amour said. He liked that word. You could see it land on him like rain on dry ground. “That’s something I understand. A man who jokes because the joke is what keeps him putting one foot in front of the other. Cowboys did that. Trail hands, mountain men, all of them. The humor was the same as the jerky — it kept you going when there was nothing else.”

“But it also keeps other people at a distance,” Portis said. “Which is the other thing the humor does. You joke so you don’t have to say the real thing. You describe the cow patty so you don’t have to describe the fear.”

“These two men,” I said. “The two old hands on a last job. I want them to be friends who can’t say they’re friends. They’ve ridden together for thirty years, and neither one has ever said anything directly about what the other means to him. Is that a Western thing or is that just a male thing?”

“It’s a human thing,” L’Amour said. “But the West made it worse, because the West gave men a vocabulary of action and nothing else. You could say ‘I’ll ride with you’ and that meant everything — loyalty, love, a willingness to die. But you couldn’t say ‘I’ll miss you when you’re gone’ because that vocabulary didn’t exist on the frontier. It had been left behind with the parlor furniture.”

“Gus and Call,” I said.

“Gus and Call,” L’Amour said, nodding. “McMurtry understood that. The whole book is about those two men circling around the thing they cannot say, and the cattle drive is just the excuse for the circling. The cows don’t matter. The destination doesn’t matter. What matters is that they are riding together and it is the last time and neither one can bring himself to acknowledge it.”

Portis pushed his tray away. He had cleaned every plate, which seemed characteristic. “McMurtry let Gus talk. That’s the trick. Gus talks and talks and talks and most of it is nonsense and jokes and provocation, and hidden inside all that talk is the real feeling, and Call — who doesn’t talk — hears the real feeling but can never respond to it because he has sealed that part of himself shut. The tragedy of Lonesome Dove isn’t that Gus dies. It’s that Call carries the body back across Texas and still can’t say why he’s doing it.”

“He doesn’t have to say it,” L’Amour said. “The act says it.”

“The act says it and it also doesn’t say it, and that’s the whole point,” Portis said. “Hauling a dead man a thousand miles is either the most eloquent expression of love in American literature or the most stubborn act of denial. It’s both. It’s both at the same time, and McMurtry is smart enough not to tell you which one to feel.”

“I want that in our story,” I said. “Two men, and one of them talks — he’s the voice of the piece, the Portis narrator, the one with the deadpan observations and the dry assessments of everything — and the other one doesn’t talk, or talks only about practical things, about the horses and the weather and how far to the next water. And the whole story is the talking man trying to get the silent man to acknowledge something, and the silent man refusing, and the refusal being its own kind of eloquence.”

L’Amour shook his head. Not in disagreement. In something closer to resignation. “You’re going to make the silent one a L’Amour character. I can see it coming.”

“Is that wrong?”

“It’s not wrong. It’s just — I’ve spent my career writing men who express themselves through action, and I’m aware of the limitation. I know my men don’t talk enough. I know they reach for the rifle when they should reach for the word. But I also know that there are men like that, real men, men I’ve known, for whom the word is the weapon they were never issued. They are not silent because they are stupid or because they are emotionally stunted, whatever that means. They are silent because they grew up in places where silence was the dominant language and they learned it fluently.”

“Nobody’s calling them stupid,” Portis said.

“No, but irony can make them look stupid. If the narrator is the quick-tongued one and the partner is the silent one, the reader sides with the narrator. The reader thinks the narrator is the smart one and the silent one is the simple one. And that’s a lie. The silent one isn’t simple. He just uses a different grammar.”

This sat on the table for a while. The cafeteria was emptying out. A woman was wiping down the steam table with a rag that had seen better decades. Portis watched her work with the kind of attention that a man gives to competence, which is to say, with respect.

“What if the narrator knows he’s the lesser man?” Portis said. “What if the humor isn’t superiority? What if it’s the opposite — it’s how he handles knowing that the man next to him is braver and more capable and more morally certain than he will ever be? He jokes because the alternative is admitting that he has spent his whole life next to someone who makes him look small, and the joke is the only tool he has for surviving that knowledge.”

L’Amour looked at him. “You’d write that?”

“I’d write a man who uses wit the way a worse man uses whiskey. As medication. As a way of not feeling the full weight of the situation. And the situation is that the world he knows is ending — the open range, the long drives, all of it contracting — and his best friend is dying or leaving or both, and he can’t stop any of it, and the jokes keep coming because if they stop he’ll have to stand in the silence and hear what the silence is saying.”

“What is the silence saying?”

Portis drank the last of his tea. “That he is going to be alone. That the person who made his life make sense is going away and the sense is going with him. And he will be left in a world he doesn’t recognize, telling jokes to people who don’t know what the jokes are about.”

The cafeteria was nearly empty now. The fluorescent lights buzzed. Through the window, Little Rock looked the way all mid-size American cities look in the middle of the afternoon — functional, ordinary, going about its business with the unconscious confidence of a place that does not know it is being observed.

“There has to be a job,” L’Amour said. “Something physical. Something with stakes. They’re not just riding around being elegiac. Two old cowboys going somewhere for a reason, and the reason matters, even if the reason is also the excuse.”

I suggested a last cattle drive. A small one — not the thousand-head drive of Lonesome Dove, but something modest. A hundred head, maybe fewer. From one place to another place that doesn’t much want them anymore. The buyer may or may not still be buying. The trail is one they’ve ridden before but not in years, and the landmarks have changed — a fence where there wasn’t one, a town where there was only a crossroads. The West is closing and they are pushing cows through the gap before it shuts entirely.

“That’s too on the nose,” Portis said. “Last cattle drive. Dying West. Two aging men. You’ve described a country song.”

“It’s on the nose because it’s true,” L’Amour said. “The last drives happened. Real men rode them. The fact that it makes a convenient metaphor doesn’t make it less real.”

“I’m not saying it isn’t real. I’m saying the reader will see the metaphor before they see the cows, and once they see the metaphor, the cows become furniture. I’d rather the cows be cows. I’d rather the drive be a drive. If the elegy comes, let it come from underneath, not from above.”

“How do you do that?” I asked.

“You keep the problems small. The horse has a stone bruise. The creek crossing is washed out. One of the cows is determined to go left when every other cow is going right, because cows are like people and there is always one who insists on going left. You write the small problems and you write the two men solving the small problems the way they’ve always solved them — with competence and habit and occasional profanity — and the reader understands without being told that this competence is the thing that is ending. You don’t need to say the West is dying. You just need to show two men who are very good at something that nobody needs them to be good at anymore.”

L’Amour was leaning forward. “Yes. That. The competence. I’ve always believed that competence is the highest virtue a Western can portray. Not courage — courage is a by-product. Not honor — honor is a construct. Competence. The ability to do the necessary thing, and to do it well, and to do it without complaint. A man who can shoe a horse and read a river and keep a herd moving in the right direction — that man has mastered a curriculum that most people will never even be aware existed. And when that curriculum becomes obsolete, the man becomes obsolete, and he knows it, and he does not have the vocabulary to protest it because the vocabulary of protest is not part of the curriculum.”

“So he makes a joke,” Portis said.

“So his partner makes a joke,” L’Amour said. “And the joke is the protest, but it’s a protest that has already conceded the argument.”

I asked about The Virginian — about the tenderfoot. Whether our story needed a younger character, someone being transformed by the frontier, or whether we should resist that. Two old men and no tenderfoot. No one learning anything. No one being changed except by time, which changes everyone whether they want it or not.

“The tenderfoot is a mirror,” Portis said. “Wister needed someone for the Virginian to be impressive in front of. Without the tenderfoot, the Virginian is just a competent man doing competent things, and the Eastern reader doesn’t know to be impressed. The tenderfoot’s awe is permission for the reader to feel awe.”

“We don’t need a mirror,” L’Amour said. “We have the narrator. If the narrator is the one with the mouth, the one who talks, then the narrator can be the mirror — but a broken one. A mirror that shows you the image and also cracks wise about it.”

“I like that the tenderfoot in The Virginian gets hardened,” I said. “He arrives soft and leaves changed. But the real hardening isn’t learning to ride or shoot. It’s the hanging. When the Virginian has to hang a cattle rustler who was his friend, and the tenderfoot watches, and what he learns is that the code demands things that friendship can’t survive. That the West isn’t just physical hardship — it’s moral hardship. It asks you to do things that make you worse.”

“It doesn’t make you worse,” L’Amour said, and there was an edge in it. “It makes you different. Worse is a judgment from the parlor.”

“All judgments are from the parlor,” Portis said. “That’s where the books get read.”

L’Amour didn’t answer that. He looked at his plate, which still had half the mashed potatoes on it, and he seemed to decide something. “I want the silent one to do something in this story that the narrator can’t. Not a big thing. Not a gunfight, not a rescue. Something the narrator sees and doesn’t comment on. Something that sits there without a joke around it. One moment where the competence is just competence, without any verbal frame, and the narrator lets it be.”

“The narrator not speaking,” I said. “That’s the emotional climax.”

“Don’t call it that,” Portis said. “Don’t call it anything. The moment you name it, you kill it. Let the narrator shut up for half a page and let the reader sit in the silence and feel whatever they feel. If you’ve done the work — if the jokes have been doing their job for the whole story — then the silence will be louder than anything the narrator could say.”

I asked whether the story should end with the drive finished or not finished. Whether they get the cows where they’re going.

“It doesn’t matter,” both of them said, and then they looked at each other, and the moment was strange — not quite a smile on either face, but something adjacent to it.

“Whether the cows arrive is not the question,” L’Amour said.

“The question is what the two of them do the morning after the drive is done. Or the morning after they decide it can’t be done. The morning when there is no job, no task, no excuse to be riding together. What do they say to each other when there is nothing left to do?”

“They don’t say anything,” Portis said. “One of them makes a joke about breakfast.”

L’Amour stood up and put his hat on. Portis stayed seated. I had the sense that Portis would sit in this cafeteria until they turned the lights off, and that this would suit him fine, and that he would regard the darkened cafeteria with the same steady, amused, unperturbed attention he had given everything else.

“A joke about breakfast,” L’Amour said from the door. He seemed to be testing the weight of it.

“About eggs,” Portis said. “Something about eggs.”

L’Amour left. Portis ate the last bite of his meat loaf, which he had apparently been saving. The cafeteria woman with the rag wiped the table next to ours and did not look at us. I sat with my notes and tried to see what they had given me: two men on the last drive, one who talks and one who doesn’t, and the talking is love and the silence is love and neither man has the courage to say so, and the cows go where cows go, and the West closes behind them like a door that was never meant to stay open.

I asked Portis if he had any last thoughts.

“Eggs,” he said. “Don’t forget the eggs.”

I didn’t know what that meant, but I wrote it down.